Artists Performing

Rivers Of Nihil Biography

"Nihil" is Latin for "nothing." For other uses, see Nihil (disambiguation).
Nihil is the eighth studio album by industrial rock group KMFDM, released on April 4, 1995 on Wax Trax!/TVT. Nihil was recorded in 1994 in Seattle, Washington, and featured the return of former band member Raymond Watts and the first appearance of journeyman drummer Bill Rieflin. The album was mostly written by band leader Sascha Konietzko, who emphasized a less guitar-driven sound for the release. Nihil's first single, "Juke Joint Jezebel", is the band's most widely known song of all time, with millions of copies sold over various releases. Widely praised by critics, Nihil is one of the band's best-selling albums. After the original release went out of print, a remastered version was released in 2007.

Background:
In late 1993, Sascha Konietzko and fellow multi-instrumentalist En Esch both left Chicago, moving to Seattle and New Orleans, respectively. Lead guitarist Günter Schulz left the country, moving to Kelowna, British Columbia. In early 1994, Konietzko started working on new material, and Schulz came to Seattle to begin adding guitars to the tracks. Later that year, the group assembled in Los Angeles to rehearse for the upcoming Angstfest tour in support of Angst, which spanned April and May. Konietzko, Schulz, Esch, and guitarist Mark Durante were joined by another guitarist, Mike Jensen, for a live show that featured up to four guitarists playing at once. Konietzko and Schulz, along with Dutch singer Dorona Alberti, returned to Seattle to begin recording vocals for Nihil. Konietzko later said he was not happy with the sessions, explaining that nothing was coming together, and only two songs from the upcoming album, "Trust" and "Brute", had been completed to his satisfaction.
Former KMFDM member Raymond Watts, last seen contributing vocals, programming, and production to 1988's Don't Blow Your Top before starting his own band, Pig, called Konietzko and asked if he would be interested in working on a small musical collaboration. Konietzko agreed, and Watts flew to Seattle, where the pair, along with Schulz, worked on an EP entitled Sin Sex & Salvation. Konietzko said of the trio's working together, "It was the breath of fresh air I had been hoping and waiting for. This short project took my mind off the problems with the KMFDM album and gave me a welcome change of perspective." Watts then stayed on with the group to begin work on Nihil, which featured a core group of Konietzko, Schulz, Watts, and Esch, along with some input from steel guitar specialist Durante and drummer Bill Rieflin.

Production:
Discussing the change in songwriting from Angst, Konietzko said: "I wasn't comfortable with the band scenario on that album, where everybody had input. It allowed for too many compromises. Angst seems not organic to me." In another interview, he explained: "Contrary to the past, I wrote all the songs for Nihil," adding that doing things that way caused "minimal problems".
Konietzko stated that the band overused guitars on their previous album, Angst, saying it sounded "like guitarists jacking off". On Nihil, the guitars were mixed in last. Durante had recently purchased a triple-neck Fender steel guitar in Houston, and used it during recording sessions, but added a significant amount of distortion to it, making it sound like a "regular" guitar but giving it what he called a "sliding" sound. Konietzko also brought in a trio of horn players to perform on "Disobedience", saying he had always wanted a horn section in a KMFDM song, but that he had never been able to afford it before.
Konietzko originally wrote thirty songs over a period of eight or nine months for Nihil before settling on ten final tracks. Watts came into the studio after the songs were mostly complete and added lyrics to a handful of songs, which he said was "actually quite liberating" in contrast to writing his own music from scratch. Konietzko described the album as being entirely foreplay, without any resolution, and said it was the band's best album to date, a statement he believed he would be standing by for years. He also said its poppier sound was more his style. Konietzko produced the album with sound engineer Chris Shepard, who had also engineered the band's previous album.

Release:
Nihil was originally released on April 4, 1995. A digitally remastered re-release of Nihil was released on March 6, 2007, along with a similar re-release of KMFDM's 1996 album Xtort. The band toured twice in 1995 in support of the album, first doing the Beat by Beat tour shortly after the album's release, and then the In Your Face tour later in the year. The album, which had "major buzz", had an initial shipment of 75,000 copies.
The song's first track, "Ultra", was featured in the U.S. release of Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, and was the theme song for Manga Entertainment's anime catalog trailer. "Juke Joint Jezebel", the band's biggest hit, was featured in the film Bad Boys and in an episode of Beverly Hills 90210. "Juke Joint Jezebel (Metropolis Mix)" was featured in the film Mortal Kombat. The video for "Juke Joint Jezebel" includes footage from the Patlabor 1 manga movie. More than two million copies of the song sold in 1995 alone. KMFDM went on two tours, Beat by Beat and In Your Face, in support of the album in 1995.
Nihil is one of only two KMFDM studio albums (Opium being the other) that does not feature cover artwork by pop-artist Brute!. Instead, the cover was designed by Rieflin's wife Francesca Sundsten. The band would return to using Brute!'s work on the next album, Xtort. The text which reads "Nihil" was changed from white to green on the album's 2007 remastered reissue.

Critical reception:
Nihil received very favorable reviews from music critics. Heidi MacDonald of CMJ New Music Monthly called Nihil "a superb album that takes no prisoners from beginning to end," saying that the first three tracks are "nearly flawless" and calling "Disobedience" a "real standout." Andy Hinds of AllMusic also praised the album, calling "Juke-Joint Jezebel" "an enduring and indispensable dancefloor favorite at goth/industrial clubs around the world." He further said that the production on Nihil was "state of the art" and that KMFDM's sound was "quite polished and tight." Mark Jenkins of the Washington Post said the album "manages to stay fresh through the use of assorted sonic spices," adding that the album has "some canny accents."
Keyboard praised the album, describing "milky organ pads" on "Disobedience" and "snarling guitars wrapped in spiky synth barbed wire" on "Juke Joint Jezebel", and saying of band leader Konietzko, "You won't find a more imaginative or effective keyboardist on the hard-core scene." Chris Gill of Guitar Player, conversely, said "the most interesting parts are Durante's steel guitar lines, which howl like revving engines". Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune said that "Juke Joint Jezebel" "swaggers like a Bourbon Street hooker, with crunching guitars and a swooping, gospelish chorus" at the time of the album's release, and in 2011, said the album put "a polished pop spin on industrial's characteristic harshness". Gill had similar praise, saying "few have succeeded in making the combination of techno rhythms and thrash guitars sound as natural as this".
Nihil was Wax Trax!'s best-selling album to date by the end of 1995, and went on to sell over 120,000 copies by August 1996.Nihil reached No. 16 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart, and was later labelled one of Wax Trax!'s commercial high points.

Rivers Of Nihil Biography

"Nihil" is Latin for "nothing." For other uses, see Nihil (disambiguation).
Nihil is the eighth studio album by industrial rock group KMFDM, released on April 4, 1995 on Wax Trax!/TVT. Nihil was recorded in 1994 in Seattle, Washington, and featured the return of former band member Raymond Watts and the first appearance of journeyman drummer Bill Rieflin. The album was mostly written by band leader Sascha Konietzko, who emphasized a less guitar-driven sound for the release. Nihil's first single, "Juke Joint Jezebel", is the band's most widely known song of all time, with millions of copies sold over various releases. Widely praised by critics, Nihil is one of the band's best-selling albums. After the original release went out of print, a remastered version was released in 2007.

Background:
In late 1993, Sascha Konietzko and fellow multi-instrumentalist En Esch both left Chicago, moving to Seattle and New Orleans, respectively. Lead guitarist Günter Schulz left the country, moving to Kelowna, British Columbia. In early 1994, Konietzko started working on new material, and Schulz came to Seattle to begin adding guitars to the tracks. Later that year, the group assembled in Los Angeles to rehearse for the upcoming Angstfest tour in support of Angst, which spanned April and May. Konietzko, Schulz, Esch, and guitarist Mark Durante were joined by another guitarist, Mike Jensen, for a live show that featured up to four guitarists playing at once. Konietzko and Schulz, along with Dutch singer Dorona Alberti, returned to Seattle to begin recording vocals for Nihil. Konietzko later said he was not happy with the sessions, explaining that nothing was coming together, and only two songs from the upcoming album, "Trust" and "Brute", had been completed to his satisfaction.
Former KMFDM member Raymond Watts, last seen contributing vocals, programming, and production to 1988's Don't Blow Your Top before starting his own band, Pig, called Konietzko and asked if he would be interested in working on a small musical collaboration. Konietzko agreed, and Watts flew to Seattle, where the pair, along with Schulz, worked on an EP entitled Sin Sex & Salvation. Konietzko said of the trio's working together, "It was the breath of fresh air I had been hoping and waiting for. This short project took my mind off the problems with the KMFDM album and gave me a welcome change of perspective." Watts then stayed on with the group to begin work on Nihil, which featured a core group of Konietzko, Schulz, Watts, and Esch, along with some input from steel guitar specialist Durante and drummer Bill Rieflin.

Production:
Discussing the change in songwriting from Angst, Konietzko said: "I wasn't comfortable with the band scenario on that album, where everybody had input. It allowed for too many compromises. Angst seems not organic to me." In another interview, he explained: "Contrary to the past, I wrote all the songs for Nihil," adding that doing things that way caused "minimal problems".
Konietzko stated that the band overused guitars on their previous album, Angst, saying it sounded "like guitarists jacking off". On Nihil, the guitars were mixed in last. Durante had recently purchased a triple-neck Fender steel guitar in Houston, and used it during recording sessions, but added a significant amount of distortion to it, making it sound like a "regular" guitar but giving it what he called a "sliding" sound. Konietzko also brought in a trio of horn players to perform on "Disobedience", saying he had always wanted a horn section in a KMFDM song, but that he had never been able to afford it before.
Konietzko originally wrote thirty songs over a period of eight or nine months for Nihil before settling on ten final tracks. Watts came into the studio after the songs were mostly complete and added lyrics to a handful of songs, which he said was "actually quite liberating" in contrast to writing his own music from scratch. Konietzko described the album as being entirely foreplay, without any resolution, and said it was the band's best album to date, a statement he believed he would be standing by for years. He also said its poppier sound was more his style. Konietzko produced the album with sound engineer Chris Shepard, who had also engineered the band's previous album.

Release:
Nihil was originally released on April 4, 1995. A digitally remastered re-release of Nihil was released on March 6, 2007, along with a similar re-release of KMFDM's 1996 album Xtort. The band toured twice in 1995 in support of the album, first doing the Beat by Beat tour shortly after the album's release, and then the In Your Face tour later in the year. The album, which had "major buzz", had an initial shipment of 75,000 copies.
The song's first track, "Ultra", was featured in the U.S. release of Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, and was the theme song for Manga Entertainment's anime catalog trailer. "Juke Joint Jezebel", the band's biggest hit, was featured in the film Bad Boys and in an episode of Beverly Hills 90210. "Juke Joint Jezebel (Metropolis Mix)" was featured in the film Mortal Kombat. The video for "Juke Joint Jezebel" includes footage from the Patlabor 1 manga movie. More than two million copies of the song sold in 1995 alone. KMFDM went on two tours, Beat by Beat and In Your Face, in support of the album in 1995.
Nihil is one of only two KMFDM studio albums (Opium being the other) that does not feature cover artwork by pop-artist Brute!. Instead, the cover was designed by Rieflin's wife Francesca Sundsten. The band would return to using Brute!'s work on the next album, Xtort. The text which reads "Nihil" was changed from white to green on the album's 2007 remastered reissue.

Critical reception:
Nihil received very favorable reviews from music critics. Heidi MacDonald of CMJ New Music Monthly called Nihil "a superb album that takes no prisoners from beginning to end," saying that the first three tracks are "nearly flawless" and calling "Disobedience" a "real standout." Andy Hinds of AllMusic also praised the album, calling "Juke-Joint Jezebel" "an enduring and indispensable dancefloor favorite at goth/industrial clubs around the world." He further said that the production on Nihil was "state of the art" and that KMFDM's sound was "quite polished and tight." Mark Jenkins of the Washington Post said the album "manages to stay fresh through the use of assorted sonic spices," adding that the album has "some canny accents."
Keyboard praised the album, describing "milky organ pads" on "Disobedience" and "snarling guitars wrapped in spiky synth barbed wire" on "Juke Joint Jezebel", and saying of band leader Konietzko, "You won't find a more imaginative or effective keyboardist on the hard-core scene." Chris Gill of Guitar Player, conversely, said "the most interesting parts are Durante's steel guitar lines, which howl like revving engines". Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune said that "Juke Joint Jezebel" "swaggers like a Bourbon Street hooker, with crunching guitars and a swooping, gospelish chorus" at the time of the album's release, and in 2011, said the album put "a polished pop spin on industrial's characteristic harshness". Gill had similar praise, saying "few have succeeded in making the combination of techno rhythms and thrash guitars sound as natural as this".
Nihil was Wax Trax!'s best-selling album to date by the end of 1995, and went on to sell over 120,000 copies by August 1996.Nihil reached No. 16 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart, and was later labelled one of Wax Trax!'s commercial high points.

Wolf Gang Biography

It was perhaps inevitable that Max McElligott would one day make an ornate pop album of near-symphonic grandeur named after a utopian place that came to him in a dream. It might not have been written in the stars that he would make said album, Suego Faults, with one of America's best producers, Dave Fridmann, nor that he would do it under the guise of Wolf Gang, but the rest now looks something like a certainty when you consider his background.

Still only 24, Max moved around a lot as a child because of his historian father's work, from Hull to Ann Arbor near Detroit in the States to St Andrews in Scotland. It was there that he joined a local pipe band where, in his kilt, he would march down the cobbled streets. "It was," he recalls, "very rousing." Another factor that contributed to his love of the symphonic and grand was his violinist mother's tendency to take her son to concerts as a child where he would watch her play with a full orchestra. "When you've seen a symphony orchestra banging out Mozart's Requiem at full blast, created completely acoustically, that can be rousing, too," he says, recalling the visceral power of the music. "The ridiculous levels of bass produced by the cellos and the choir- you can feel it hit your chest. To experience that when you're young and small when everything is big anyway, to have it implanted in your brain - well, it definitely had an impact."

Then there were the vast horizons and breathtaking scenes he witnessed as a kid with the Grampians as his default background near his home in Strathkinness. "It was a very wild place, but it was amazing - you could see for 30-40 miles," he says. "It helped shape how my music sounds. It gave me a love of the wide soundscape - I'm not afraid of making a sound that is big and ambitious. Maybe it would have been different if I'd grown up in a bedsit in the city."

Seeing those numerous musicians in the orchestra made him keen to learn to play their instruments himself - all of them. "It's a cost-cutting exercise," he jokes of his multi-instrumental abilities. His entry point was the piano, and then the drums: he was sticksman for six years in a band that he formed at school: "A typical sweaty bunch of boys playing covers of Neil Young and Jimi Hendrix tunes in our bedrooms."

After the drums, le deluge: these days, he is proficient on guitar, bass, piano and keyboards, glockenspiel and assorted other instruments, which he has gathered at his flat in North London. Being able to play so many different ones has allowed Max to be as eclectic as he wants, and he is now able to express the many musical ideas that he's had since childhood, growing up in a home with parents who would expose him to everything from David Bowie and Talking Heads to Senegalese folk, Irish rebel songs and jazz.

Music was an obvious career option for Max, but it was by no means the only one. He may have left the LSE before completing his finals, but his university dissertation was a consuming passion and pointed towards the romantic visions of Suego Faults.

"The title of the thesis was, 'Is the Notion of Romanticism a Western Construct?'" explains Max, who grew up with two sisters and attended a girls' school where he was one of only two boys. "It was an exploration of the concept of falling in love and finding a partner, and of such eternal questions as, 'Is monogamy a social construct?', and 'Does love exist in a universal form, or are our ideas of love a luxury that only Western culture can afford?' Does a Bendjele tribesman of the Congo, for example, have similar romantic thoughts to an Irish farmer?"
While he was pondering these thorny dilemmas, he was considering filling out application forms for an alternative career: being a spy for the Foreign Office in which he could live out his James Bond fantasies and 'live the fast life in exotic countries'.

In the end, Max left the LSE before completing his degree and, following a series of glamorous day jobs - including oat-picking in Scotland and scraping bacon fat off of trays in a London hotel kitchen - he began working on bedroom demos (one of which would go on to be released by the indie label Neon Gold) that would see him compared, by the Guardian's influential New Band of the Day column, to David Bowie and David Byrne. Atlantic Records heard the demos and promptly signed him. Songs such as Lions In Cages provided signs of Max's future as Wolf Gang. "I was definitely pushing in a more grandiose direction," he says.

To help fully realise his grandiose dreams on his debut album Suego Faults, he enlisted the help of Dave Fridmann, producer of Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev and MGMT and a man eminently capable of creating cosmic pop symphonies in his Tarbox Studios in upstate New York.

"It's quite a large sound," considers Max. "There's a gloriousness to the production, and a certain ambition."
Messrs McElligott and Fridmann arrived at that sound the hard way: Max recorded the songs in his bedroom in Kentish Town using a ripped copy of the 'cubase' software programme, singing and playing all the parts himself. He then took those prototype versions of the tunes to Tarbox, where he and Fridmann worked up the finished versions together, to the extent that they share a co-production credit on the album sleeve.

Max explains that the sound they achieved at Tarbox - Fridmann's signature shimmering, enveloping psych-pop - came from using his "amazing equipment", including "the finest compressors", and by "recording bits of music and making them more 3D by at times utilising the spaces, and at others minimising the silence and pushing everything to the limit."

He admits that discussions did take place as to how cosmic and grand Suego Faults should be. "Quite often Dave actually wanted to leave my stuff simple and not go completely mental. He didn't want to do a crazy mix. There were discussions about not going overboard for the sake of it because that's what people expect from him as the mad producer."

Eventually, they got a sound they could both appreciate. "Dave's not a gushing kind of person - just the fact that you're in his studio means he likes what you do - but afterwards he did ring to say he was very excited about the album. He said some of it reminded him of the early Rev stuff. That was cool."

Suego Faults is a magnificent collection of accessible, experimental pop. It opens with Lions In Cages, which merits contention alongside that other Fridmann-produced album opener, MGMT's Time To Pretend, for double-tracked vocal exuberance and sheer Technicolor euphoria. "The weird delays and crunched-up drums, the wobbly pizzicato violin, the compressed synths, drums and programmed beats all went towards making that signature Dave Fridmann sound," Max explains. "It's an acoustic performance, with a modern feel; one played by humans that sounds a bit electronic. It's a classic sound in a modern context."

Next track Something Unusual features a snappy, staccato Elvis Costello-ish vocal delivery. That may not be coincidental: it was written on a piano given to him by Clive Langer, producer of Costello's Punch The Clock album. Stay and Defend is infectious piano pop while next single, The King and All of His Men, is a charging, surging potential hit that just happens to concern terrorist cells "bringing their fight" to the UK. Midnight Dancers, Max's favourite on the album, sounds like a classic 70s rock ballad, updated for 21st century consumption. A track about two former lovers who come together after years apart for "one final roll of the dice and a dance on the cobbled streets of Paris", it could have come from the pen of Elton John or Paul McCartney.

And that's Suego Faults all over: superb songcraft, dexterous musicianship, and florid but not over-fussy production, for a suite of songs about unrequited love and post-apocalyptic paranoia. The title of the album may have come to Max in his sleep, but this is a dream of an album that will linger long after it ends. Throughout, he sings in a mid-Atlantic accent, as per his heroes Elton and Bowie, because "when you sing with a slight American accent, it's less angular and easier on the ear". He loves Elton for his melodic sensibility and Bowie for the way he would restlessly change and become steeped, from one album to the next, in a completely different set of aesthetic criteria and referents. Mostly, though, he just digs the tunes. His love for older music is complimented by some more modern day influences he has such as Grizzly Bear and Arcade Fire – all this combined makes for one very interesting man whose love for music clearly runs very deep and goes beyond just writing great jams.

"I didn't want to make a record for highbrow musos, I wanted one that everyone could enjoy, with good melodies and lyrics," he decides, finally. "That's all I've ever wanted to do. To make an upbeat summer album that is accessible, only in a credible way."